Wide Angle Lenses

Wide angle lens have many advantages for CCTV and IP video surveillance. The first advantage is wide field of view. See images above. The second advantage is quite good low-light performance. And last but not least,  wide angle lens provide good depth of field in compare with telephoto lenses.  Well known drawbacks of wide angle lens are possible geometrical distortion which appears as visible curvatures at the edges of a camera image and higher requirements for the camera resolution.

This is a reason to find a proper balance between the wide field of view and possible drawbacks of wide angle lenses.

To find a proper focal length for wide angle lens the CCTV designer needs to perform many calculations. To ease the lens selection the designer can use special 3D CCTV design software where you can clearly see all 3 paramteres: actual field of view, lens distortions and camera resolution.